Dave Gilson

Senior Editor

San Francisco native, word wrangler, data cruncher, chart drawer, pun maker. Recent areas of interest: campaign finance, income inequality, prison riots.

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Dave Gilson has worked at Mother Jones since 2003. Previously, he worked for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Northern California bureau of the New York Times.

Backlash in Baghdad: An Interview with Manal Omar

A report from the front lines of the war against women in Iraq.

—By Dave Gilson

| Fri Jan. 28, 2005 1:00 AM PST

One third of the candidates in Iraq’s January 30 elections are women, and women have been guaranteed 25 percent of the seats in the country’s new national assembly. But even with such provisions in place, the status of women in Iraqi society after Sunday’s vote remains uncertain. Women are facing a growing backlash, according to Manal Omar, the director of Women for Women International’s program in Iraq. “It’s been really difficult coming to terms with how bad the situation has become,” she says. “We’re seeing women’s rights leap backwards.”

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Bury the Chains: An Interview with Adam Hochschild

Uncovering the history and enduring impact of the world's first human-rights campaign.

—By Dave Gilson

| Mon Jan. 10, 2005 1:00 AM PST

Check out Adam Hochschild's story about Congo's resource plight from MoJo's March/April 2010 issue here.

In the late 18th century, a small group of Englishmen went out on a limb and put forward the radical notion that slavery was wrong. At first, their proposal that Enlightenment ideals of equality and liberty should be extended to the millions of African slaves held in Britain’s colonies looked like a non-starter. “The idea of ending slavery seemed totally utopian, crackpot, wildly too idealistic,” says journalist and writer Adam Hochschild. Yet, as Hochschild recounts in his new book, Bury The Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, these abolitionists proved themselves right in far less time than anyone might have imagined. Slightly more than 50 years after its humble birth in a London print shop in 1787, the British antislavery movement overturned the atrocity that had formed the economic backbone of the world’s most powerful empire.

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"I Will Disappear Into the Forest": An Interview With Wangari Maathai

The late Nobel Peace Prize winner talks about sowing the seeds of democracy in Kenya.

—By Dave Gilson

| Wed Jan. 5, 2005 1:00 AM PST

Wangari Maathai

Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai died on September 25 in Nairobi. She spoke with Mother Jones in 2005, not long after she had received a Nobel Peace Prize.

In October, Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize is the latest distinction in a 30-year career that's been defined as much by Maathai's accomplishments as the controversies she has sparked. After studying in the United States in the early 1960s, Maathai returned home to become the first East African woman to earn a Ph.D. Shortly afterwards, her parliamentarian husband initiated a messy divorce. She fought back by quitting her university deanship to run against him for his seat. Though she lost the race, she'd found her calling as a fiercely outspoken activist. In 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental group that restored indigenous forests and assisted rural women by paying them to plant trees in their communities. It has since planted over 30 million trees in Kenya, provided work for tens of thousands of women, and been replicated in dozens of other African countries.

What made Maathai's movement remarkable, and would eventually attract the attention of the Nobel committee, was how it erased the distinctions between environmentalism, feminism, democratization, and human rights advocacy. Maathai saw a direct connection between problems such as deforestation and soil erosion and the failures of Kenya's one-party state. "I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these issues become linked to governance, to corruption, to dictatorship," she says. Throughout the 1980s and '90s, she boldly confronted the country's ruling party and its autocratic president, Daniel Arap Moi. In their most visible showdown, Maathai led a successful campaign against Moi's plan to build a 62-story party headquarters, complete with a larger-than-life statue of himself, in Nairobi's Uhuru Park. Though her objections were largely environmental—the park was one of the city's few open green spaces—it was clear that she also sought to humble a "Big Man" who was not used to being defied, especially by a woman.

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Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

By Adam Hochschild. Houghton Mifflin. $26.95.

—By Dave Gilson

| January/February 2005 Issue

In his latest book, Adam Hochschild -- a founding editor of Mother Jones -- chronicles the unlikely success of the British antislavery movement. In just 50 years a band of idealists and iconoclasts managed to shut down an institution that had fueled the expansion of the British Empire for nearly three centuries. As detailed in an excerpt published in Mother Jones (“Against All Odds,” January/February 2004), they did it by forging many of the tools of modern activism, from newsletters to petitions to consumer boycotts. Bury the Chains’ protagonists prevailed by doing what even the most media-savvy modern organizer must do to win -- stirring public passion against an injustice, no matter how deeply ingrained.

Oil Slick

The Obiang regime tries to spin the Riggs scandal.

—By Dave Gilson

| Mon Dec. 20, 2004 1:00 AM PST

So far, the Senate investigation that revealed Teodoro Obiang’s questionable dealings with the Riggs Bank and American oil companies has caused relatively little fallout for his regime. It has moved its money to accounts outside the jurisdiction of U.S. regulators, and it continues to do business with the same firms that made millions of dollars worth of unorthodox payments to Obiang’s family and associates.

Yet Equatorial Guinea’s strongman did not completely brush off last summer’s brief P.R. hit. In September, his government issued a statement condemning the investigation and its findings. As detailed in its indignant 82-point rebuttal, the Equatoguinean government claimed the Senate investigators not only got their facts horribly wrong, but that they did so with the “clear intention of denigrating” its image.

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